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by Curt Kovener
There isn’t anything funny about the cemeteries around Jackson County. At one time though there was some prose etched onto tombstones. Today it is a name and a beginning and ending date separated by a dash.
But at one time, short poems would capuslize the deceased’s life. And often times their sense of humor remains long after their body had returned to the elementats of the earth.
Take, as example some of these tombstone epitaphs:
•On the grave of Ezekial Aikle in East Dalhousie Cemetery, Nova Scotia:
Here lies Ezekial Aikle
Age 102
The Good Die Young.
•In a London, England cemetery pn the grave of Ann Mann
Here lies Ann Mann,
Who lived an old maid
But died an old Mann.
Dec. 8, 1767
•In a Ribbesford, England, cemetery grave of Anna Wallace
The children of Israel wanted bread
And the Lord sent them manna,
Old clerk Wallace wanted a wife,
And the Devil sent him Anna.
•Playing with names in a Ruidoso, New Mexico, cemetery:
Here lies Johnny Yeast
Pardon me for not rising.
•Memory of an accident in a Uniontown, Pennsylvania cemetery:
Here lies the body of Jonathan Blake
Stepped on the gas Instead of the brake.
•In a Silver City, Nevada, cemetery:
Here lays Butch,
We planted him raw.
He was quick on the trigger,
But slow on the draw.
•A lawyer’s epitaph in England on the tombstone of Sir John Strange
Here lies an honest lawyer,
And that is Strange.
•Someone determined to be anonymous in Stowe, Vermont:
I was somebody.
Who, is no business of yours.
•Lester Moore was a Wells, Fargo Co. station agent for Naco, Arizona in the cowboy days of the 1880’s. He’s buried in the Boot Hill Cemetery in Tombstone, Arizona:
Here lies Lester Moore
Four slugs from a .44
No Les No More.
•John Penny’s epitaph in the Wimborne, England, cemetery:
Reader if cash thou art in want of any
Dig 4 feet deep and thou wilt find a Penny.
•On Margaret Daniels grave at Hollywood Cemetery Richmond, Virginia:
She always said her feet were killing her but nobody believed her.
•In a cemetery in Hartscombe, England:
On the 22nd of June – Jonathan Fiddle went out of tune.
•Anna Hopewell’s grave in Enosburg Falls, Vermont has an epitaph that sounds like something from a Three Stooges movie:
Here lies the body of our Anna
Done to death by a banana
It wasn’t the fruit that laid her low
But the skin of the thing that made her go.
•More fun with names with Owen Moore in Battersea, London, England:
Gone away Owin’ more Than he could pay.
•On a grave from the 1880’s in Nantucket, Massachusetts:
Under the sod and under the trees
Lies the body of Jonathan Pease.
He is not here, there’s only the pod:
Pease shelled out and went to God.
•The grave of Ellen Shannon in Girard, Pennsylvania is almost a consumertip:
Who was fatally burned March 21, 1870
by the explosion of a lamp
filled with “R.E. Danforth’s Non-Explosive Burning Fluid”
•Oops! Harry Edsel Smith of Albany, New York:
Born 1903–Died 1942
Looked up the elevator shaft to see
if the car was on the way down. It was.